A Woman in Berlin.

A very bracing read. It raises moral dilemmas that cannot be resolved by the order and elegance of conventional probity. The author, a German journalist named Marta Hiller, kept a diary during the fall of Berlin to the Soviet army. She describes the deprivation of modern necessities such as gas and electricity, so that lights and common kitchen appliances are now useless, having to barricade themselves under the bomb-pummeled ruins of what were originally their apartments like "cave-dwellers", widespread hunger, and fear. These cosmopolitan Berliners start hearing the stories from displaced Germans, who escaped from the east and are now living with them, about rampant gang raping and murder by the Soviets. Perhaps, stemming from Hiller's journalistic background, the tone of her writing is almost detached from the ongoing horrors of what some human beings can joyfully do to their fellow human beings, even when she is experiencing it them firsthand. She has a fiancé, a German soldier who